By all rights, I should hate Mixtape. A nostalgia-drenched teen drama that pines for someone else’s childhood experience, interspersed with aimless mini-games and a soundtrack that’s decent, but also incredibly blunt in its application? Yes, this game is all of that, but for everything it does that is predictable and kitschy, it also has just enough genuine heart to keep me compelled. Like a catchy song you can’t help but tap your foot to, there’s a simple joy to be found if you can ignore some of the pretensions in the presentation.
Put simply, Mixtape is a short, story-focused game with limited gameplay and heavy emphasis on its licensed soundtrack. Our protagonist is Stacey Rockford, a music-obsessed teen and playlist sommelier preparing for her first big leap out of high school along with her friends Slater and Cassandra. She’s reckless and cocky, but her passion is contagious and she easily reads as neurodivergent. Meanwhile, Slater comes across as your typical stoner-bro, but he occasionally shows a more sensitive and empathetic side that I wish was centered a little more to balance out Stacey’s self-absorption. It’s Cassandra, however, that forms the real emotional core of the trio. An overachiever raised in a strict household, she’s searching for some kind of identity of her own by defying her parents and attaching herself to the two biggest delinquents in her school. Sure, it’s not Shakespeare and definitely not subtle, but Mixtape sells the emotions the group is feeling pretty well. However, I do wish we got to explore a bit more outside of Stacey’s limited perspective and see other sides to her friends.
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As for the gameplay itself, you’ll mostly be hanging out in the cast’s bedrooms, checking out a smattering of interactables before one triggers a flashback with an accompanying mini-game. These can range from playing sports, throwing toilet paper at the school principal’s house, or simply choosing what flavor to put in your slushie abomination. There’s little goal beyond messing around. When there is a chance of failure, the game usually just rewinds a little bit for you to try again. It’s not a challenge or test of skill. You’re just messing around as kids do. While I usually find this kind of structureless play a little unengaging, here it felt short, sweet, and just the right amount of whimsical.
It helps that it’s all set to music, too. The titular mixtape is in fact a soundtrack arranged by Stacey to accompany all the day’s events and flashbacks. It’s solid and spans a good few decades, but it’s also incredibly narrow and anglocentric in its selection. The majority is alt-rock or something adjacent, with very little that places it in a distinct moment beyond ‘some time in the 90’s, probably’. Now, that can be excused diegetically by Stacey being a bit of a snob and not as cultured as she thinks, but if that were intentional it should really have been explored a bit more. Her friends seem well aware of this self-absorbed tendency, knowing immediately that when she asks a question about music that she’s actually setting up her own moment to answer, but there’s otherwise little pushback to her authority over all things audio and we see little of how their tastes might differ. Stacey claims her her mixtapes have a “cosmic talent” to influence people, but its more likely she’s just bowling over others with the force of her personality and the game misses out on interrogating that.
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Ultimately, that’s my issue with Mixtape. I genuinely enjoyed some of the characters and the decidedly low-key gameplay, but they never quite saw the level of thematic exploration I really wanted. Still, I can’t deny it succeeded in getting me to slow down and appreciate the moment it was presenting, . If you can handle this level of weapons-grade nostalgia, or even just dig the music it’s borrowing, you may well find something to appreciate about Mixtape.
Mixtape is immediately available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.
